this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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As an American mechanical engineer, i do more unit conversions between metric and standard/ uscs than many people do in a lifetime
Hell just today I designed a custom spring in both as i need it asap and have to settle for the inch
Canadian engineer here. Although we use the metric system in principle, in reality we use feet and inches for everything. There are lots of benefits to using base 12 for measurements.
The number 12 has six factors, which are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. It is the smallest number to have six factors, the largest number to have at least half of the numbers below it as divisors, and is only slightly larger than 10. (The numbers 18 and 20 also have six factors but are much larger.) Ten, in contrast, only has four factors, which are 1, 2, 5, and 10.
I get the Europeans hate it though because only the people who live near Chernobyl can count to 12 on their fingers.
12 is better than 10, I'll give you that. But 100 is better than 144, and 1000 is way better than 1728.
And that doesn't even get to 0.1 versus 1/12, or 0.01 versus 1/144.
So 12 might be a better standalone number, but it's a terrible base to work in.
But 144 is better than 100, for the exact same reason that 12 is better than 10?
There's a reason measured angles go to 360ths, then subdivided by 60 or even by 60 again.
100 is as terrible a base as 10, and you run into it all the time if you're designing something in metric; you can't divide by 3 evenly.